Active Learning Panel

Instructor College hosted an Active Learning Panel on May 24, 2013. Thirty librarians attended and heard from five colleagues, each of whom demonstrated an active learning exercise used in instruction.

Steve Lonn presented VoiceThread. VoiceThread is an online presentation tool that is unique because of the multiple options for audience members to add public comments. Students can type text comments, record audio and/or video comments, and also draw on slides to annotate them.

For some classes Steve teaches, he preloads slides into a VoiceThread presentation. Some of the slides prompt students to reflect about their own practice. In the end, the presentation is one part Steve’s original content and many parts student contribution.

During Steve’s presentation, we were encouraged to one-click register with VoiceThread, then experiment with commenting on a sample VoiceThread. We then discussed some ways librarians might use VoiceThread, perhaps during instruction, or maybe as a pre- or post-instruction activity.

Our second presenter was Mark MacEachern, who talked about Clinical Case instruction for medical students. Health Science instruction mimics the real-life environment, where clinicians will be faced with medical questions and will need to use the library resources to find answers.

In these clinical cases, the Librarian instructors present students with questions based on real medical cases. The Librarians then suggest resources that the students will find useful. Students then search for information that they can use to diagnose the health problem and suggest a treatment.

Librarians co-teach with medical school faculty, who comment on the results reported by the students. Librarians then highlight the strengths of the various resources.

Following Mark’s presentation, Catherine Morse presented on an exercise that she uses in a UC 370 class. Catherine begins this exercise by talking about how difficult data are to find. She also talks about users of data need to understand the data, and how research methods influence the data that come from studies.

To illustrate, Catherine gives her students an exercise where they find census data from their hometowns. By looking at how the data are reported through the years, Catherine is able to open a discussion of how census forms have evolved over time, and how the changes to how questions have changed how data on populations are reported.

Amanda Peters followed Catherine’s presentation with a demonstration of a Database Searching exercise use with undergraduate students. This exercise gives groups of students assigned databases and questions to search in them.

After students have had time to work with the databases, they report out to the larger group on what they’ve found: The types of articles indexed, whether full textis available in the database, and what options for citing are available. As students report out, Amanda comments on their search strategies and on strengths and weaknesses of the different databases.

With this exercise, Amanda finds that students immediately apply the skills that they learn in the early part of the instruction session, and they also learn from their peers.

Susan Turkel gave the final presentation. Susan presented a quality exercise that she uses in Psychology instruction. Students work together in pairs to answer the question, “How do you figure out which search results are good?” – or which are the higher quality search results that instructors will want to see cited in papers.

As students report out to the larger group, Susan discusses their results with them and fills in the blanks. In a final part of the exercise, Susan passes out lists of references for students to review. She asks them to make notes about the pros and cons of the various references and whether students would use these references for their papers or not.